Good Morning everyone, today is Tuesday, August 3, 2021. I am right here on the balcony doing some of my favorite things, speaking with you and watching the surf as the sun comes up.. actually I’m a little Leary about the sun today, it seems a little cloudy.
I’m also a little amazed and intrigued because I can also see the pool, technology is a wonderful thing, I see many things in the water and was thinking ‘what are they’ and I realized they are cleaning the pool and chlorinating it. All done by machines. When I was young I was the machine, everyday I had to vacuum, skim, put chlorine in the pool. Test the water ph, that was my job. If I wanted to use it I had to take care of it, not a bad lesson.
Cape May is a resort town so I love to drive and see all the hotels and motels, inns, bed and breakfasts. It seems one is nicer than the other. I have always loved the idea of a hotel and thought wouldn’t it be nice to live in one, like in New York, you would meet the most interesting people. Growing up, so many years ago as I did, road trips were the major source of vacationing, cars were becoming more prevalent and roads and highways were being built to take you anywhere with ease, but this all brought about the concept of the Motel, it combined the two words motor and hotel. My father was a real proponent of this, he loved the idea of pulling up to your room, unloading the car without a bellman. When it was time you reloaded your car and off you went . Check in and out in a breeze none of the hassles of a hotel. So this mode of travel became the way to go in the 50’s through the 70’s when I believe Motels were at their peak, they are still there today and used by millions.
Hotels, however just seemed a better fit for me. I have stayed in many around the world and me being me has a story for just about everyone of them, so this vacation week I will share some in our talks, some are really funny and things that only happen to me.
I have spoken many times about my first trip to Paris alone at 16. How grown up I felt at the time,that I was able to do this and how lucky I was that my parents gave me this opportunity. When the bus pulled up in front of the Hotel Dagmar in Paris’s left bank, I thought wow a real European hotel, so the priest escorted us in and showed us our rooms, there were 15 of us so we were three to a room. He then showed us where the toilet was down the hall, and the shower or bath down another hall. At this I started to wonder why our room didn’t have its own bathroom. Then we went downstairs where he showed us the breakfast room, every hotel I’ve ever stayed in in Europe had a breakfast room, I like that concept. But basically that is the only meal they served. So he said are you guys okay , you know where everything is now, so I will pick you up for mass Sunday, so take care of yourself and be the gentlemen you are and got back in the bus and left, and true to his word we didn’t see him for the next three days. So we went back to our room to look around, out the back window was a little garden, in the room was a curtain behind it we found a toilet or what we thought was a toilet, none of us had ever heard of or seen a bidet and we really didn’t know what it was, until one of the older guys explained it purpose, but for the next two weeks it is where we urinated.
Everyday the breakfasts were amazing to me, the others wanted more food but it was not an American breakfast with eggs and bacon and what not, it was a European breakfast, crossiants, baguette, some fruit ,cafe au lait and
amazing preserves. Til this day I like that kind of breakfast on vacation.
Over the years the smell of the Hotel Dagmar has remained with me, it was sort of intoxicating. What I came to realize years later was that it was the combined smells of croissants, espresso and paint, yes at the time they were painting the hotel. Nonetheless all these years later I can still recall that smell with pleasure. What I have also come to realize is at the time the Hotel Dagmar was not the palatial mansion I thought it was, it had actually seen better days but to me it will always remain Grand. The ignorance of youth.
Well under cloudy skies, it is time for my morning cafe, so I will wish you a glorious day, hopefully some of these clouds will burn away. Til Tomorrow!
A
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